TechStuff Builds a Sound System

have a lot of very strong opposing opinions. I don't know that there's any issue in tech where the real fanatics of that technology have as many fundamental disagreements as those in the high end audio equipment field. It's it's got elements of mysticism in there, because it's all about experience, you know this, this idea of the audio experience. Their devotees of audio systems, who will argue to the grave

that the most important components are the speakers. For example, they'll say, the speakers are absolutely where you have to spend the most attention and time and money to get the right ones. Others will say, no, no, no, you're wrong. The most important piece of equipment in a high end audio system is the pre amplifier. You've got to have the best pre amp or else everything else is going

to be a shambles. Then there are others who will say, no, no, no, it's the source audio, the CD player or the turntable that's the most important component. And you get these arguments. If you go to any high end audio forum, you will see what I'm talking about. And then there's gonna be some audio files who will say this, this particular system I built, it's superior to all others, and it has these incredibly expensive components that create the most amazing

listening experience you will ever have. And then others will say the system you put together is garbage, and the arguments you make are without merit. Here's a good system that I put together for a fraction of the cost, and it's much better, and the arguments continue. So what I'm getting at is that the experience of hearing a sound is actually incredibly subjective. You know, you might think of it, well, a sound is a physical phenomenon, right,

sound is vibration, So how can it be subjective? Well, yeah, it's it's a physical phenomenon, But the way we perceive it ultimately is by processing the information in the gray matter in our skulls. Our brains do that last step for the experience of sound. We take in sound as a physical thing, but we process it as a mental thing, and therein lies the problem. It is possible for two different people to have to them two different experiences listening

to the same sound system. To one person it might sound perfect, and to the other it might not sound perfect. And it doesn't mean one person's right and one person is wrong. For each person that might be the true answer. And it also gets really tricky because audio files use

really kind of vague language to describe sound. They want a listening experience to be as close to the being present at the recording session as possible, for example, although these days that gets harder and harder to do because there's so much post production in music that there's no such thing as a recording session kind of experience for

some of that music. But let's say it's a symphonic piece, you know, classical music, it might mean that an audiophile wants to be able to make a clear distinction between individual instruments, and they'll talk about sound having quality is like warmth or brightness, and being able to create a space,

a spatial quality to the music. And these are interesting terms, like if you experience the sound, you might say, well, I get what they're saying, but there's not really a quantitative way two express those ideas in many in many cases, so it almost becomes a spiritual experience, and thus it

becomes very complicated to talk about the technology. Now that being said, audio component manufacturers have a product they want to sell, and selling and experience is pretty hard to do unless you can convince a customer to come in for a demonstration and to sit through a demonstration that includes lots of different variables and to kind of come to that conclusion of this particular high end audio system is the one for me because it produces the sound

that I feel is superior. So since that's not possible with everyone, a lot of component manufacturers will focus instead on numbers. So numbers. You know, we were comfortable with numbers, and typically we say the higher the number is, the better the thing is, right, The more megapixels that camera has, the better the camera is. Right. Not necessarily the same

is true with high end audio equipment. You'll start to see numbers being bandied around for all sorts of stuff, but that does not necessarily tell you how good it will sound to you. This, by the way, makes me think of a famous scene in the comedy This is Spinal Tap, where the character Nigel Toughness explains to his his documentarian that his martial stack amplifier has dials that

go up to eleven. And he says, most bands use equipment that maxes out at ten, which means if they need something extra and they're already at ten, there's nowhere else to go. But he can go up to eleven, so he can go one more than they can. And then that documentary in character called Marty de burgh E, says, well, why don't you just make ten louder and make ten the top number? And then Nigel's responses these go to eleven. It's a very silly scene, but it illustrates my point.

Some companies will cite numbers in a way that sounds meaningful but may not actually make a real difference in the experience of listening to audio. Another element that makes it hard to sell audio components is that there's been a major shift, specifically in the last decade, where we've seen the the real focus of the audio experience skew

heavily toward convenience over fidelity. By that, I mean it is wicked convenient to be able to carry an entire music library around on a portable device and listen wherever you go, or more commonly these days, you're using a device to log into a music streaming service and then listen on demand to practically any song you can think of, though in reality, obviously you only have access to whatever music labels that service has made agreements with, So you

might think of a song and look for and find out, oh, well, that's not available on this service. But you get what I mean. You can have thousands, hundreds of thousands of songs available to you, and it's all through this portable device. The audio experience just needs to be good enough. It doesn't have to be fantastic. It just has to have enough fidelity where the convenience is the most important factor.

Now audio files. People who truly strive to get that that amazing audio reproduction experience, they shudder at the thought of this because to them, the idea of listening to music that's in a lossy format over an inner connection SAPs the audio of its character and its depth, And these days, audio systems, those high end audio systems are becoming more of a niche market than ever before. And the luxury systems were always a niche market because they're

incredibly expensive. You know, you're talking about thousands of dollars per component. But even the mid range market stuff, the stuff that was in the hundreds of dollars, that's becoming more of a niche market because there are fewer people who want to collect music physical media of music, and want to have a big sound system. Not that there

aren't any, but there are fewer of them. So in this episode, I am not going to give you a checklist of specific brand names and models that you need to go out and buy if you want to build a dream audio system, because what sounds great to me might not sound great to you, and it would be a disservice. This reminds us that the experience of hearing something is dependent not just on a physical phenomena, but mental processing, and goodness knows, the way I process information

in my brain is whackadoodle crazy. But what I can do is walk through the various parts of a typical high end audio system and talk about what each one does. And I do think it's possible for the quality of the sound produced by a system to change just by swapping out a component or two. Now, some might make a much more noticeable impact than others. Some might be

subtle enough to go largely unnoticed. And while you might get better performance from a certain type of high end product than a less costly version, I don't think that's necessarily true across the board. I don't think higher price always equals better quality. Again, it's subjective. So in some cases, you might find that a system that is relatively inexpensive is producing an experience that you find particularly compelling. That's the wonderful thing about it. Of course, the opposite. It's

also true. You might find that a really expensive system is the one that genuinely sounds the best to you, in which case you have some important decisions to make. All right, So, let's say that you want to put together an audio system, and you're not going to go out and buy a cheap all in one system. You're not going to buy an off the shelf stereo system all in one thing. You want something with more modularity. Maybe you want to create the best possible experience according

to your preferences. Maybe you also want the option to replace modular parts with upgrades when you can afford them. So you might say, well, based on my budget, I'm gonna buy an amplifier and all these other components, but I'm not gonna go with the amplifier that would be my first choice. It's too expensive. I'll go with a lower cost version, and then maybe later when I've saved up money, I'll swap that out. Because if it's a modular system, you can do that. You can take one

piece out and replace it with another one. It's also easier to make repairs. If something breaks and you've identified which part of the chain is the broken one, you can disconnect that and then go and get it fixed. Basically, your audio system will consist of these parts. You've got your sound sources. These are the components that are creating the signals that go through the rest of the system. It's the origin point for the signal. So in a

digital system, you can talk about CD player. With an analog system, it might be a turntable, it could be other sources as well, and you can have hybrid systems where it's both digital and analog systems. That's totally possible. Then you have things like amplifiers, pre amplifiers and receivers. These take in signals from a sound source and then

they send that signal onto speakers. And you might say, well, why would you why would you have an in between component, Because general logic says the more components you put in between an origin and its destination, the more opportunities there are two we can a signal. Well, it's because for a speaker to work, to drive the drivers inside a speaker, to make those speaker diaphragms vibrate properly to reproduce sound, you need to have a stronger signal than what these

origin sources can create. The signals, the electric signals they create are too weak to drive that speaker on their own. So an amplifier's job is to take that incoming signal and amplify it, to boost it without introducing any noise, if possible, so to to replicate that signal as precisely as possible, but at a greater amplitude, and then send that onto the speakers. Then, of course you have the speakers. That's the component that actually creates the vibrations that we

experience the sound. They have the drivers inside the vibrate, they take in the incoming electric signal, and then through electro magnets caused the diaphragms inside the speaker drivers to move in and out. Laterally, that causes air molecules to move,

of which propagates a sound. And then, of course, between all of these components, you have your various interconnects or cables, and the cables carry the signal from one part of the system to the next part of the system, and each of those parts are important to some extent, and it's also important to remember that a sound system made up of components is really only going to perform as

well as the weakest part of the system. So you might have a killer amplification system, you might have really sweet speakers, but then you've got a super cheap vinyl turntable, and the signal that vinyl turntable is going to supply to the rest of that system might not be very good. You might get a lot of noise in there. That means you're gonna get an amazing reproduction of a crappy

audio signal. Likewise, you might have a phenomenal turntable that creates a really clear, fantastic signal and you've got great amplifiers, they take that signal and they boost it up reliably. But then you've got really weedy speakers and the sound you get is really tenny, and there's not a lot of base, and it's not truly representative of what the rest of the system could do if there were better speakers attached to it. And also note that when I

say better, I don't necessarily mean more expensive. Sometimes budget or mid cost components can perform just as well or better than the super high end stuff. It all depends upon the full system. Now this isn't just me dismissing luxury products. There have been numerous tests, many of them blind studies, that have demonstrated that, at least with certain components, listeners are unable to identify which one is supposedly the top performing piece of equipment with a regularity that suggests

that it was better than just by chance alone. So in other words, you could have a test where you've got three different amplifiers, let's say, and you have one that's a really high end luxury amplifier, you've got one that's a mid range one that's a budget and you might find through your test thing that people are just not reliably able to identify the luxury component with a

lot of them. A lot of these tests, I see that whatever is the lowest price piece of equipment, people tend to be able to point at that and say that's just not as good as these other ones. So there is there is a point where performance will drop off if the component was not made with good materials and and good engineering. But there can be times where something that is supposed to be a super high performing piece isn't distinguishable from a mid range component, for example.

And again it's a subjective experience. It may very well be that to one person the luxury piece of equipment does create a better sound, to another person that just doesn't. Uh. And in other cases it may just be people saying I can't really tell the difference, so I'm just going to kind of guess. So it's hard to say. Now we've got all that ambiguity out the way. When we come back, I'll start breaking down the individual components more closely.

But first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, let's start with those source components, as those are the ones providing the signal sent to the rest of the system. Some would argue, and I would probably be among them, that this is probably the most important component of the sound system, because again, if your audio source is sending out a crappy signal for whatever reason, it really doesn't matter how good the rest of the components are. You

can't improve a crappy signal. Really, you're going to get a subpar experience. You might be able to have some noise correction and some other elements worked in with those components, but ultimately you want that original signal to be as good as possible. So generally speaking, we can divide all of these audio sources into two broad categories. You've got analog that would be stuff like a turntable or an analog cassette deck. Analog components don't require any signal processing

apart from amplification to drive us as speakers. And then you have digital. Digital components include stuff like compact disc players or DVD audio players. These components require something called a digital to analog converter to take that digital information and change it into an analog signal. Now, the reason for this is the nature of analog versus digital and analog signal is continuous. Think of it as a sign wave. All right, it's one continuous line. It's got peaks and

Scott valleys, but it's uninterrupted. That's analog. Digital is really more of a series of instances, almost like snapshots, right, we call those samples. So you take a sound and you take samples, snapshots of that sound at a specific interval, and you that could be thousands and thousands of times per second, but it's not continuous. It's almost like animation if you think of cells and animation. It's a series of images and when you play it back at a

certain speed, it appears to be seamless movement. Well, it's kind of like that, except we're talking about snapshots of data, and when you play them back at proper speed, then it can simulate a seamless sign wave. But you still have to take one more step. You still have to take that digital information and turn it into an analog signal.

It's not truly an analog wave, no matter how many times you're sampling a sound per second, It doesn't matter how many samples you have, it's not an analog wave. So technically, you take a digital to audio converter and they take this fixed point value, this set a fixed point values that represent a sound and they translate that into a physical variable voltage. So, uh, this continuously variable signal is something that the rest of the system can handle.

So many c D players, in fact, a lot of consumer CD players, especially the stuff that's not meant to go in high end audio systems, have an integrated digital to audio converter included in their design. It's part of the system. So if you've ever had just a regular CD player or home audio system that's connected to speakers, and you're thinking I didn't need anything special, well, it's because the d a C, the digital audio converter, was built directly into the product. But if you're a super

audio file you can essue that stuff. You could say, no, I'm not gonna go with that. I'm gonna go with a standalone d a C device, So you would connect your digital store, which for CDs that would probably be a transport. A transport is technically it's essentially a CD player. It just doesn't have a d A C. So it's a CD player. It can read the data off the disk, but it doesn't have the digital to audio converters. So if you hooked up this kind of CD player to speakers,

nothing would happen. You would need the digital to audio converter in between those. Uh so it's it's it's almost like a CD player that's missing apart and the standalone D a C would convert that incoming digital signal into an analog one and send that along the rest of the system to the amplifier and then ultimately to the speakers. Another potential source of digital signal is a computer system. Right,

we don't just have CD players and DVD players. In fact, fewer and fewer people are using those for their audio. A lot more people are using computers. I talked about that earlier with the convenience argument. We store a lot of music and digital file formats these days. The quality of audio you're gonna get from a digital file largely depends upon the type of file you're using. There are lots of different file formats, some of which use heavy compression and uh file types like MP three those are

lossy formats. So in order to compress file sizes, and the whole purpose of that is to make the more manageable, right, to shrink the file size down so they're easier to store and to pull up and and send in order to make that happen to compress that information, what the format does is essentially a ditches digital information that makes

up part of that sound. Now, in theory, the compression algorithms are eliminating frequencies that we would otherwise be unable to hear, So, in other words, it's just trying to get rid of superfluous information that we would never perceive in the first place. The range of human hearing is limited. Typically we describe it as being between twenty hurts and

twin d thousand hurts. Those frequencies mark the edges of human hearing for the for the average person, anything below twenty hurts or above twenty thou hurts for nearly everyone is imperceptible. So one way you can reduce a sound file size is you look for any data that references frequencies that are outside the range of human hearing, and you say, well, I don't need it because there's no way to perceive it, so get rid of it. Dump it.

If there are two or more instruments that are playing and one is slightly louder than the other, or significantly louder than the other, we often can't hear the softer one. Uh, if there's a really loud sound, we typically cannot hear the sound immediately following that. It's just a quality of human hearing. So again, a compression algorithm might say, well, here's the sound, and it's amplitude as such that the listeners never going to hear this next sound that is

in the file, So we're gonna dump that too. Right again, if you can't perceive it, why would you save it? That's the the logic behind us. But this can actually change the quality of the sound we hear, even if it isn't in a direct way. So one thing that could happen is you could have a really you know, low bit rate for this kind of compression, and then you end up creating a a pretty lossy file. Your your file is going to be smaller, but the fidelity is going to be very low to the point where

you're gonna be able to hear it. Moreover, compression algorithms tend to reduce dynamics, so we call dynamics would be the description of the difference between the softest and the loudest sounds in a recording, and uh, compression tends to squish all that in a bit so that your loudest loud sounds and your softest soft sounds are closer together.

You have less dynamic range. And because more of us listen to digital music and have sort of moved away from analog sources, music itself has moved away from creating songs with really great dynamic range. We see musicians focusing on ranges that have less dynamics in them. We're seeing music produced with that smaller dynamic range from the very start, Why would you craft something with great dynamic complexity if no one's ever going to hear it, Because they're listening

to a compressed digital stream over the internet. So it's actually changing the way people make and record music, not just store it and play it back. But then they're also lossless file formats. These are digital files that preserve all the information from a recorded session. Then the quality of your listening session is dependent upon three main factors. The equipment that was used to make the original recording.

That's going to be important. Also, I mean, I guess you could argue the actual performance of whatever it was that's gonna make a difference, But we're talking about reproducing that performance. So the equipment used to make the recording is important, the equipment used to convert that recording into a digital format is important, and the equipment you're using to listen to that recording is important. Lossy formats depend on those things too, but they also depend upon the

compression algorithms. That adds yet another factor that can affect the sound quality. So what makes a great analog or digital source component? Well, again, that comes down to subjective preferences. So with turntables, there are different drive systems that audio files argue over endlessly. So is a belt drive better than a direct drive, a friction drive where you've got an element that's pressed up against the platter on the turntable and when the element turns, it causes the turntable

to turn. Or is it a belt drive where you have a belt wrapped around the turntable or another piece that's in contact with the turntable and the belt provides the rotational motion. There are arguments back and forth over which one is superior, and they're they're pros and cons to both. But I covered all of that in the Turntable History episodes I did a while back. So the answer really comes down to it depends on the turntable, And another factor that impacts audio quality is the cartridge

on the turntable. The cartridge is the part of the the turntable, the record player if you will, that holds the stylus or needle of a turntable. It also holds the the mechanics inside that convert the vibrations of the needle into an electric signal. So the four basic types of cartridges are moving magnet, moving iron, moving coil, and

then ceramic cartridges. But all of them are responsible for taking those physical vibrations and converting them into an electric signal that then gets passed on to the other components. From what I've researched, the moving coil cartridges seem to be the darlings of audio files. Now this is outside of my area of expertise, but it was based upon the research I was doing. The styluss in an uh in A moving coil cartridge causes a cantilever to move a pair of coils back and forth over a stationary

magnetic core. And the coils are conductive wire, right, so we know what that means. You move a conductive wire by a permanent magnet or vice versa, you move a permanent magnet by conductive coils, it induces current to flow or really and it induces a difference in voltage within

those coils. And there's a pair of coils because you want to be able to create stereo, right, so one coil for each channel in a sound system with CD players or transports audio files will look to systems that minimize vibration, that operate quietly, and that use few errors while reading disks, and of course they look to digital audio converter systems that can convert digital signals to analog

audio signals with as much accuracy as possible. And the quality of sound you get will also depend upon the physical media you're playing. If you're putting in a CD that's got a bunch of scratches on it, or you've got a worn down vinyl record that you put on a turntable, you're probably not going to get the ideal listening experience. Some systems have some error correction that can fix some things, that can jump over some of the scratches let's say on a on a CD, for example,

but not everything does. And ultimately you're gonna want that physical media to be in as good shape as possible. You also want to make sure that your equipment isn't producing unreasonable wear and tear on that media. Next we're gonna look at the interconnects or cables, and then we'll talk about amplifiers, pre amplifiers and receivers as well as speakers. But first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright, cables. Time to talk about cables. So cables are important. You

want good shielded cables. A shielded cable protects the electric signal from that's being carried by the cable from interference from electromagnetic interference. If you've ever had a poorly shielded cable like a headphone cable, you've probably heard interference like that. I remember I used to have a pair of really cheap speakers for a desktop computer, and whenever my phone would go off, if it was anywhere close to those cables,

you would start getting this digital stuttering noises. Didate did it because the phone, when it was receiving a call, would generate this electromagnetic interference. So we get picked up by the cables and then sent on to the speaker as if it was a legitimate sound that my computer was trying to play. So you don't want that. You want good shielding around your your cables, and you want

the cables to have really good solid connectors as well. Right, you want the part that you're plugging into the component to have a good connection with the rest of the cable, because if if it's a weak connection, then you're gonna get intermittent broadcast quality, like you're gonna get intermittent playability. So those are important. But when you when you get down to it, after that, the nature of cables starts

to become another really contentious one. There are cables out there that are marketed as being superior to all others, largely because of the materials that are being used in the actual cable, like gold plated connectors, that kind of thing. But tests can tend to be inconclusive on this matter. A well constructed cable, one that loses less of a signal due to resistance, tends to perform are in tests,

which seems reasonable. Cables that are less well constructed tend to perform lower, again not a big surprise, but the differences are again largely subjective, and the prices for high end cables can get truly astronomical, like thousands of dollars for a cable that's a meter in length, especially if you start looking for cables that are longer. Let's say that you want to create a sound system where you're

hooking up speakers throughout a large space. It can get prohibitively expensive, very very quickly, because those cables get super super expensive, thousands of dollars for a cable. And also, there are analog and there are digital audio cables, but for your good audio system, like a Hi Fi audio system, you pretty much just need analog cables. Digital audio cables are mostly designed for theater systems to provide multiple channels

so that you can get stuff like surround sound. But your typical audio recordings are more in the stereo world, not surround sound world, So you just need a cable that's going to provide really good stereo channels. Also, you may have heard about directional audio cables. Now, these are as the name suggests, cables that indicate which end should plug into a specific component, with the idea of the signal can travel better down one direction of the cable

versus the opposite direction of the cable. So you might have a directional cable that says this end needs to plug into your source audio, and this other end needs to plug into your pre amplifier or amplifier. Now, based on my research, that claim largely seems unsupported. So in other words, it might be true, but I've seen no evidence to actually support that claim, and so I see

no reason why anyone should seek out directional cables. The only time it matters is if the components you're connecting have proprietary fittings, like a proprietary port, which requires cables to be plugged in a specific way because there's no other way to do it. But typically you don't want to avoid that because one of the beauty, beautiful things I should say about having one of these audio systems is that modular approach where you can swap out components.

But you can't really do that if you're using proprietary connectors like you, you'd have to stay within that same family of products because otherwise the cable you have would not plug into the component you're using. So you want to typically use components that have universal connectors, and most do. Now that we've got cables all the way, let's take a look at what I think of as the heart

of a sound system. This would be the collection of components that can include a receiver, a tuner, amplifier, and a pre amplifier. Now I said can include because there are a lot of variations here. Not all systems are going to have all of these different components. So a tuner is a radio. The tuner is what allows you to tune into a specific radio frequency to pick up a different station. And the antenna of a radio will receive tons of different sign waves representing different radio signals.

So the tuner tells the radio which of those sign waves to pay attention to and which wants to ignore, essentially ignore all the rest. Tuners use resonance to do this. The radio has a resonator that can be set for specific frequencies. That's by tuning the dial and at that specific frequency, the resonator resonates and amplifies that incoming signal, which is then processed and amplified further to go to the speakers and then you can listen to the radio.

I've done episodes our radio work, so I'm not gonna go into further detail here. Pre amplifiers and amplifiers take that incoming signal and then strengthen it to send out to speakers. A pre amplifier takes an incoming signal and boost it up to what you would call line signal strength and send that on to an amplifier for further amplification. So are pre amplifiers necessary? Could you just plug source components like CD players or turntable into an amplifier. Well,

this is a contentious issue. Some pre amplifiers serve as switches, so you can plug in numerous components into the pre amplifier, which then connects to an amplifier to send a signal out to the speakers. And if you've got lots of different source components, that could be important. So you connect all the source components to the pre amplifier, use the pre amplifier to switch to the proper source component that

you want to listen to. Let's say that you have just finished listening to a record and now you want to listen to a CD, so use the pre amplifier to switch from the vinyl turntable input to the c D input. Then you might need a pre amplifier, but some people argue again that the more components you put between the source and the speakers, the more opportunities you have to degrade the signals, so there's some truth to that as well. It could be that an extra step

in the chain from turntable to speaker could introduce some errors. Receivers, by the way, are essentially amplifiers that also have the radio tuner incorporated in them. So you've got these various components. They're all meant to take that incoming signal, amplify it, and incented out to the speakers. And to make matters more complicated, there are different types of amplifiers. Their transistor based amplifiers which rely upon electronic components to amplify the signal.

There are tube based amplifiers. They use good old fashioned vacuum tubes to amplify the signal. There are hybrid systems that use elements of both. Now, I've talked about amplification and other episodes too, so again I'm not gonna go over it there. I'm already running long, so I don't have time to go into the science and technology behind amplification. But I have covered that in previous episodes, and there are audio files who will swear up and down that

a tube system is superior to a transistor system. But I've also read about a lot of tests that are more inconclusive on that if the person listening has no idea, if he or she is hearing an audio recording produced with a a system using either tubes or transistors, and they're unable to tell the difference, then there's really no benefit from one versus the other. Um that's not saying

that there's no difference at all. Again, some people might be able to perceive a difference, the others legitimately might not. It's all very subjective, so this does not also mean that all preampts, amplifiers, and receivers are equal. Some legitimately do a better job than others. Some may introduce errors in a signal which the speakers will then produce, and you will hear a reproduction of a recording that is

not as accurate as you might like. But I've seen a lot of tests that suggests that while there are differences, the brand and the cost are not necessarily indicators of quality. So in some cases, mid budget or even lower budget components received performance scores that rivaled or even outpaced more expensive equipment. So don't let a price tag fool you into thinking that because something costs more, it's automatically better.

It might be better, but you won't know unless you go through to that demo room and us into a whole different audio set up configurations, and you're reasonably sure that no one's messing with any settings so that they guide you to the more expensive equipment. And even then, your perception can be influenced just by knowing which brand is in play or the sticker price of a particular component,

Because perception is a funny thing. If you're told ahead of time this system you're about to hear is top of the line, you might perceive the music as being of a better quality than any of the other variations, even if there's no real discernible difference. It's just that you've added that mental expectation, and because of that, you do perceive it that way. So avoiding bias is really tricky, but also important if you want to, you know, not break the bank. The last piece of the audio system

would be the speakers. So good speakers should be able to reproduce sounds across the range of human hearing. But that's pretty hard to do, particularly when you start getting into the very low frequencies. Reproducing base UH in an accurate way is tough. It's not hard to make big booming noises, it's just tough to do it in a way that is really accurate of the original sound. It requires really large speakers with big drivers that require a

lot of power to move. Often you'll need something like a subwiffer that will have its own power source to help augment that incoming signal even more because the speaker it has to move is so heavy. Um, the driver inside is so heavy, so you need a lot more power. Uh. There are tons of different speakers out there in a huge array of price points, and just like all the other components, higher prices not necessarily mean a better experience.

Now I realize I've been hammering that home quite a bit, but it's the most important piece of information I think you can have when you're decided to build out an audio system. Audio files can sometimes fall into a trap where they believe they get a superior experience because the pieces they're investing in are expensive or have more features than others, or sometimes they have fewer features than others, because some people say the more features you introduce, the

more chances you have of introducing errors and signals. But if you visit any website that hosts discussions between audio files, you'll find a lot of dissent on pretty much every component within an audio system. So to me, that really brings it all home. You have to find the components that work correctly for the sound you want to experience. That's what is important. So that means actually going out and trying different demonstrations and finding the mix that works

for you. And that's a lot of work, but if that's what's important to you, it's worth doing. And just remember that a system made up of components, while it is modular and you can upgrade a single piece, it's never going to sound better than the lowest performing part of that system. All right. That wraps up this exhaustive overview of audio systems, And obviously I could do full episodes about each of those different components and talking great or detail what they do and how they do it.

In fact, I have done that with turntables, so maybe I'll do that with the other pieces in the future. Thank you Carl Ludvig for your suggestion. If any of you have other suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, write me an email the addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle of both of those is tech Stuff h s W. If you want to get yourself a text stuff T shirt or coffee mug or phone case, head on over to t public dot com

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